Content delivery over the internet continues to improve every day. Computer users can receive e-mail, news, games, entertainment, music, books, and web pages-all with a simple internet connection (and with improved quality on a broadband connection). Internet users have been overblessed with content lately, however. Thankfully, improved search services such as the Google search engine have allowed users to find more information more easily. Other web-based services are also available, such as maps, shopping links, images, blogs, local search, satellite images, group discussions, hosted content, and e-mail.
More and more, these services are being made available to mobile users, who now expect to receive on their telephones or personal digital assistants services similar to the services they receive at their desks. However, the displays on mobile devices are typically small relative to PC displays, so that the services do not translate well from typical PC displays to mobile device displays. As a result, certain services must be provided in different formats, e.g.—once for the desktop and once for the palmtop.
Many of these services are provided free to users, but they cost money to provide. As a result, such services are often accompanied by advertisements that help service providers defray the cost of providing the services. Although people sometimes criticize advertisements, they undoubtedly need them. We are consumers, and advertisements (whether as commercials, print ads, or other forms of promotions) are a prime way to learn about the relevant (and relative) features of products that we may wish to buy. Advertisements are, in fact, enjoyable when they are relevant to the viewer.
Thus, advertisements have been targeted, to be more relevant, based, for example, on matches between terms associated with a user, and keywords in the advertisements. For example, various vendors of ball point pens may select the word “pen” for their on-line advertising so that their advertisements are shown to some of those attempting to search on the word “pen.” Also, advertisements on a web page may be populated in a similar way, e.g., the text on a page may be analyzed to locate relevant words in the text, and then the identified text may be matched against potential key words, so that the relevant advertisements are listed on the page when a user goes to view it.